If you don’t want to accept or receive invitations to play Farmville, Scrabble, and other online games, block them in your security settings on Facebook.

Don’t join every social media network at once. Sign up for one, master it, and then move on to another one.

Learn to manage your time on social media by using an online timer.

Don’t use your book jacket as your avatar (profile picture).

Set your Facebook notifications to receive an e-mail whenever you are mentioned or you are tagged in a photo. On Twitter, you’ll want to know when you have a new follower.

If you use SocialOomph, sign up for alerts notifying you of when you were retweeted or mentioned and when your hashtag was used.

This week I’m going to share with you a number of applications that are designed to encourage social sharing while reducing the amount of time you spend on social media.

Streams of incoming messages accumulating in your news fees are some of the biggest hindrances to being social.

If you use TweetDeck, it can be maddening to see an endless influx of tweets pouring in one after the other.

When you’re new to Twitter, for example, your news feed can be fertile ground for finding content to share. But if you have 1,000 or more Twitter followers, it can be difficult to cut through the slush and find the gems that you’ll find worth retweeting.

Apps for Twitter Chats

One way you can cut through the plethora of messages is to find and join Twitter chats that focus on specific areas of interest.

Nothing can replace the feeling of immediacy that interacting with a wide number of people on Twitter will provide. They are interesting, fun, and, depending on the topic, very entertaining.

Google and Facebook are similar in one way; they frequently tweak their algorithms. It’s only Google that changes its algorithm for SEO.

And while Facebook announces its algorithm revisions without assigning names to the changed algorithms, Google does assign monikers to its changes.

In August 2012, Google introduced its mighty Pirate update, followed by one of the most famous updates in September 2014, Panda. You could practically hear SEO experts wail across the internet as they anguished over what the changes would mean for them and their clients’ websites.